Professional Development Courses

Accelerated Product Qualification. Accelerated stress testing is one of the key resources in the PoF approach and helps simulate product life cycles over compressed time periods by accelerating the damage accumulation rate for relevant wearout damage mechanisms. If done early in the development phase, in conjunction with reliability science design, accelerated testing can enhance process and design maturity and enable early introduction of mature products with robust design margins. Efficient testing requires an understanding of test methods, test stresses, test results, and correlation to field life.

Participants will learn how to make accelerated stress testing a value-added activity and use test results to take pro-active, corrective measures early in the design and production phases to ensure reliability and quality.

Advanced Packaging Technologies. Due to the ever-increasing demand of portability and high functionality, system integration becomes inevitable for successful product development and marketing leadership. The objective of this three-hour short course is to study advanced electronic packaging technologies that will enable the industry to achieve the integration goal. Attendees will master the technical concepts of advanced packaging technologies, with emphasis on process, performance advantages, and reliability challenges. Attendees are expected to have a general knowledge of electronic packaging.

Component Documentation and Supply Chain Management for Counterfeit Avoidance. There is NO alternative to good supply chain management as a defense against counterfeit parts. Understanding the supply chain and assessing the supply chain before engaging them are necessary steps for any organization. This part of the course will cover how to understand and utilize process change notices for making supply change management and counterfeit detection more efficient. The role of counterfeit part reporting as a legal and technical tool along with its promises and limitations will be discussed with examples. 

Critical System Sustainment. “Sustainment” (as commonly defined by industry and government), is comprised of maintenance, support, and upgrade practices that maintain or improve the performance of a system and maximize the availability of goods and services while minimizing their cost and footprint or, more simply, the capacity of a system to endure. Sustainment is a multi-trillion-dollar enterprise for critical systems, in both government (infrastructure and defense) and industry (transportation, industrial controls, data centers, energy generation). This course introduces the important attributes of system sustainment by integrating the data analytics, engineering analysis, and public policy necessary to develop technologies, processes, and policies aimed at sustainment management processes and practices.

Curing and Mechanical Behavior of Thermosetting Polymers. Polymer materials are involved in almost every aspect of electronic packaging, and thus, their curing and mechanical behavior have become an integral part of package design and reliability assessment. Advanced packaging technologies such as fan-out wafer level packaging, package stacking, embedded packaging, 3-D packaging, etc., are practiced more widely, but less time is allowed to characterize them for predictive modeling due to the shrinking product development cycle time. This short course aims to familiarize non-polymer experts with the basics of thermosetting polymers used in electronic packaging and eventually help them practice the knowledge for electronic packaging product development. 

Derating of Electronics. This course introduces the concepts surrounding part ratings and how to identify and determine the ratings of parts. You will learn how to read and analyze part datasheets and other technical documentation to extract the information necessary to make a decision on the part suitability in an application. The methods of determining derating conditions based on manufacturer-provided guidelines, industry requirements, standards, failure mechanisms, and other processes will be covered. A thorough review of the historic, current, and emergent derating guidelines and standards will be presented.

Electronic Part Obsolescence Forecasting, Mitigation, and Management. This course reviews DMSMS management best practices, the various mitigation approaches, and available methods of forecasting the obsolescence of parts.  In addition, pro-active methods for managing obsolescence are discussed, including design refresh planning and the use of ASICs. The course is divided into 6 sections that cover introduction to electronic part obsolescence, forecasting, mitigation, management plan and case resolution, strategic management, total ownership cost modeling, and software obsolescence.

Electronic Product and System Cost Analysis. This course provides an in-depth understanding of predicting cost of systems.  Elements of traditional engineering economics are melded with manufacturing process modeling, life-cycle cost management concepts, and selected concepts from environmental life-cycle cost assessment to form a practical foundation for predicting the real cost of electronic products.

High-Temperature Electronics. This course details the performance and reliability issues involved in designing electronic systems for use at temperatures above 125°C.  It will provide the attendee with the tools and information needed to design electronic systems that will perform reliably in extreme temperature environments, such as are found in defense, avionic and automobiles applications.

Introduction to Electronic Packaging. To form a microelectronics device, an active silicon chip requires mechanical and electrical connections to the surrounding components as well as protection from the environment. The technology dealing with these requirements is called “Electronic Packaging” (or IC Packaging). The objective of this short course is to introduce the fundamentals of electronic packaging to entry-level engineers and to lay the groundwork for further study in this area. Attendees will master the necessary background, terminologies, and requirements for various packaging technologies.

Lead-Free Readiness. This short course is intended to provide the audience with the current status of lead-free reliability and consideration of issues arising from the transition to lead-free assembled electronic hardware. The course provides up to date information on what companies should understand about lead-free materials, the reliability of lead-free assemblies, the risk posed by tin whiskers, as well as mixed solder reliability and rework and repair lead-based and lead-free assemblies.

Light Emitting Diode (LED) Reliability. This course will cover the latest progress in understanding of failure mechanisms of LEDs that occur at the die, interconnects, and within the package including electrostatic discharge, delamination, and phosphor thermal quenching. The driving factors for precipitating these mechanisms will be discussed to help the developers and users of LEDs control the mechanisms and assess reliability. The course will also inform on the relevant standards for LED testing and reliability assessment, the qualification methods currently in use by major LED manufacturers, and the qualification philosophies that will be most suitable to meet future needs for LED lighting applications.

Physics of Failure. This course introduces the classical reliability concepts and relates the concepts to the physics of failure approach. The information provided in this course will be useful for implementing a physics-of-failure methodology for the life cycle of an electronic product. The participants will learn how to develop and migrate to physics-of-failure based reliability assessment programs. The course will also teach how to facilitate the application of the physics-of-failure methodology to the complete supply chain of the product.

Package Reliability. Physics of Failure is the root cause of why, where, and how materials fail under different environmental/operating conditions. Physical models that describe failure processes at the material level are called PoF models. This course teaches how to develop PoF models and the successful implementation of such models, intended for the design for reliability (DfR) process of electronic packaging products. Moisture reliability issues are important as advanced electronic devices are nowhere more evident than high-performance products. This course aims to gain a fundamental understanding of moisture transport in polymers used in electronic packaging and teach procedures to measure the critical hygroscopic properties and predict the moisture diffusion phenomenon.

Plastic Materials for Microelectronics. Historically, PEMs have been used in commercial and telecommunications electronics and consequently have a large manufacturing base. With major advantages in cost, size, weight, performance, and availability, plastic packages have attracted 97% of the market share of worldwide microcircuit sales, although they encountered formidable challenges in gaining acceptance for use in government and military applications. Today, high-quality, high-reliability, high-performance, and low-cost plastic-encapsulated microcircuits are common. Thanks to new packaging materials, improved design, increased reliability testing, and other important developments, PEMs are not, in many cases, the most cost-effective option for a wide range of electronic systems applications.

Prognostics and Health Management. The course presents the tools and techniques for development and implementation of prognostics and health monitoring in terms of novel methods for in-situ monitoring, approaches for resource efficient data collection, algorithms for data reduction and parameter extraction, methods for identifying and analyzing precursors based on failure mechanisms, and techniques for predictions that can be used for assisting maintenance and logistics decisions. Different approaches for prognostics are presented along with implementation case-studies.

Root-Cause Failure Analysis of Electronic Products. This course will present a methodology for identifying potential failure mechanisms based on the failure history. Appropriate failure analysis techniques for various failure mechanisms will be discussed, with step-by-step details provided. Example pictures and case studies will be presented. The course will conclude with corrective and preventative actions, the most crucial part of a failure analysis report.

Uprating. The ratings on electronic parts and selection of their use for an application environment are a matter of concern for engineers in all industries. There are standards available for derating of parts that are not application specific and often outdated. This course will discuss the part ratings, how ratings are developed, and what their implications are in selecting the use environment for parts to meet the reliability and performance requirements of the system. This course will also introduce the participants to the design, assembly, test, legal and cost issues related to uprating. To stay competitive, both technically and economically, industries may need to consider using parts whose data sheet temperature limits are not broad enough to meet the application environment. 

Virtual Qualification and Reliability Assessment. This course will provide the attendees with the knowledge necessary to apply such a methodology to the qualification of components and the reliability assessment of electronic systems. Each section provides introduction to reliability science based virtual qualification and application specific reliability assessment. The course will also demonstrate how to use manufacturer's test data together with failure modeling to qualify a component for use in a particular application and application of this virtual qualification technique to the insertion of commercial components into high-temperature, high-power, automotive, and avionic applications.